The ghosts of progress: Contradictory materialities of the capitalist Golden Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This theoretical contribution will examine the process of displacement of the constitutive contradictions of advanced capitalist societies from interior to exterior during the postwar era known as the ‘capitalist Golden Age’ (1945 to 1980). I ask the following question: what if this displacement is both an inherent and necessary process? In that case, the apparent stability or expansion gained in the core during this era was not only at the expense of externalized instability and destruction ‘elsewhere’; rather, this displacement was a precondition for growth in the centre. This has normative, political and methodological implications for current projects of socio-ecological transformation based on a proverbial Green New Deal. By examining theories of unequal ecological exchange and biophysically expanded versions of the labour process as developed by ecological anthropologists such as Hornborg or ecological economists such as Georgescu-Roegen, I will explore the possibility of understanding the material trajectory of advanced capitalism as a zero-sum game. This leads to a view of capitalist development in the 20th century where the accumulation process is no longer seen as progressive. To substantiate this argument, I will re-examine the energy flow patterns that sustained the growth of American capitalism during the Fordist period of accumulation, or so-called Golden Age of American capitalism. This revision of the American experience of growth from 1945 to 1980 can be considered a contribution to the wider study of the development of the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels, or ‘fossil capital’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".